A failure to lead at the U.N.

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It is the worldâ€™s most important organization, yet remains one of the most dysfunctional.

This week a former United Nations employee described a pervasive culture of impunity inside the organization â€“ one in which whistle-blowers are punished for exposing wrongdoing. James Wasserstrom, a veteran American diplomat, said he was fired from his job and detained by U.N. police â€“ who searched his apartment and placed his picture on wanted posters â€“ after he reported possible corruption among senior U.N. officials in Kosovo.

â€śItâ€™s supposed to be maintaining the ideals of human rights, the rule of law and anti-corruption,â€ť Wasserstrom said in an interview. â€śAnd it doesnâ€™t adhere to them on the inside.â€ť

The United Nations is under attack as well for itsÂ decision last monthÂ to pay no compensation to the families of 8,000 Haitians who died andÂ 646,000 who fell ill from a 2010 cholera outbreak that experts believe Nepalese U.N. peacekeepers set off in the country.

The organization, though, remains a vital tool. On Thursday, President Barack Obama used a White House meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to pressure North Korea. Administration officials hope that punishing new U.N. economic sanctions, supported by China for the first time, will cause North Korea to end its saber rattling.

â€śIt’s important for North Korea, like every other country in the world,â€ť Obama said, â€śto observe the basic rules and norms that are set forth, including a wide variety of U.N. resolutions.”

The United Nations has been, and will always be, an imperfect institution. Its greatest strength â€“ and weakness â€“ is its 193 member states. Getting a majority to agree on major issues, pass reform or refrain from political patronage can be maddening. Russiaâ€™s shameful blocking of Security Council action against Syria, for example, has shown the continued limitations of that antiquated body.

But the United Nations is likely to grow more important in the years ahead as Washingtonâ€™s fiscal problems curtail U.S. overseas ambitions. Sadly, as the United Nations enters a potentially dangerous phase of peacekeeping missions, Banâ€™s leadership is lacking.

The 68-year-old former South Korean foreign minister has highlighted the need to combat global warming, create sustainable development and increase the number of women in leadership positions. But he has failed to provide the dynamic leadership and reforms the institution desperately needs.

â€śItâ€™s a very mixed record,â€ť said a senior United Nations official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. â€śHe spends a lot of time in Davos, the Arctic Circle or Monaco, and meanwhile there are critical issues â€“ such as the future of peacekeeping â€“ facing a real crisis.â€ť

To the alarm of some, the United Nations is returning to the ambitious peacekeeping operations of the 1990s â€“ some of which ended disastrously.

The Security Council last month authorized the creation of a 3,000-soldier-strong U.N. â€śintervention brigadeâ€ť in Congo, with an unprecedented mandate to fight with government troops against rebels, or on its own. An 11,000-troop United Nations peacekeeping mission is also expected to arrive in Mali as French forces wind down their battle against militants there. A mission in Somalia is possible as well.

â€śWeâ€™re talking about a new era of big demands on peacekeeping,â€ť said Kieran Dwyer, spokesman for the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations. â€śWe are on the cusp.â€ť

Current and former U.N. officials worry about a repeat of the 1990s debacles. Undermanned, poorly equipped peacekeepers with vague instructions about when to use force were deployed to Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Civilians who expected to be protected were abandoned.

In by far the most shameful case, 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The 1995 U.N. promise to protect the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia also proved fallacious, and 8,000 Muslim men and boys were executed.

Current and former U.N. officials fear that the â€śintervention brigadeâ€ť in Congo sets a dangerous precedent. And poorly equipped U.N. peacekeepers in Mali will be no match for committed jihadists.

â€śWell-established principles of peacekeeping are being set aside,â€ť said the U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. â€śI donâ€™t think the long-term implications are being thought through.â€ť

Meanwhile, American officials are calling for sweeping management reform at the United Nations, which spent $769 million on travel alone over the last two years, eight times the amount budgeted. The United Nations has cut some spending, but proposals to modernize its operations have stalled in the fractious General Assembly.

Employee unions and their allies have blocked a measure that would force U.N. staff, like most other diplomats, to rotate between hardship posts in war zones and posh postings in New York, Geneva and Rome. Firing employees â€“ even those caught stealing from the organization â€“ takes an enormous amount of effort in the U.N.â€™s ponderous internal justice system.

Wasserstrom, the whistle-blower, says the problem lies with top U.N. managers, including Ban, who call for reform but do little. In a six-year legal battle, Banâ€™s office challenged every aspect of Wasserstromâ€™s claim, he said.

In a landmark victory last year, a judge in the U.N.â€™s internal judicial system ruled that Wasserstrom was the victim of retaliation. Yet a U.N. review panel in March awarded Wasserstrom only $65,000 of the $3.2 million he sought in damages, a move he said was designed to discourage whistle-blowers.

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry this week, Wasserstrom called for the State Department to enforce an American law that requires the withholding of 15 percent of American aid to the UN if the organization does not have adequate whistle-blower protections in place.

A new system put in place in 2006 to defend whistle-blowers is failing, according to a study by the Government Accountability Project, an American organization that defends whistle-blowers. The group found that the U.N.â€™s ethics office received at least 343 inquiries from whistle-blowers about protection against retaliation as of last June, but only 1 percent of the claims were ultimately validated as retaliation. In the letter, Wasserstrom said that track record â€śdefies logic, probability and common sense.â€ť

Wasserstromâ€™s case, the Haiti outbreak and the new peacekeeping missions are examples of the U.N.â€™s worst dynamics. Unwilling to take major risks themselves, member states ask the organization to solve the worldâ€™s most complex problems. U.N. staffers, meanwhile, blame all of their difficulties on members not giving them enough resources. Both sides can be more committed, intrepid and innovative.

As Washington steps back in the world, a dynamic United Nations must step forward. So far, the U.N. of Ban Ki-moon has not been up to the task.

PHOTO (Top): French peacekeepers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon take part in a military parade in Tiri village, southern Lebanon, July 14, 2010. REUTERS/Ali Hashisho

PHOTO (Insert): President Barack Obama meets with United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-moon (L) in the Oval Office of the White House, April 11, 2013. REUTERS/Larry Downing

In my dream… Americans demand to no longer be a part of the United Nations. Rwanda taught me the final lesson necessary to form my opinion. Those with resources that are necessary to the power-elite receive assistance etc. those who don’t end up like Rwanda.

Your article raised many important issues but failed to understand the fundamental distinction between the role of diplomats and UN staff. As a veteran staff member, I would like to offer the following observations:
You recognized that the UN’s greatest strength and weakness it is represented by its 193 governing nations but overlooked the fact that they intentionally elected a “secretary” rather than a “general” at the helm of the organization.
It appears that you subscribed to the idea – like the current secretary-general – that the UN staff is or should be considered diplomats, and be subject to rotation in order to be efficient and effective in discharging their duties. This is a fundamental misunderstanding and contradiction that many – with the secretary-general in primis – tend to make. The large part of UN employees are not diplomats but professionals in specific disciplines (logistics, procurement, child protection, etc.) that are, in the majority of the cases, specific to the type of duty station where they operate (peacekeeping missions vs. headquarters/regional offices).
As a former diplomat, the current secretary-general approached the UN like an embassy or consulate rather than an organization supporting military operations, running humanitarian programmes, and many other activities with significant operational responsibilities. Simply rotating staff between “hardship/warzone” and “posh” locations is counterproductive, immensely expensive, and would prevent the organization from achieving the intended goals of the management reform.
History has proved that the current secretary-general, a former diplomat, led the UN to a failure, while Kofi Annan, a former UN staff a previous secretary-general, was awarded a Nobel Prize and upheld the ideal of the rule of law against “weapons of mass delusion”.

West New Guinea (West Papua) had gold that Americans wanted, so they tricked Kennedy into blackmailing the Dutch into signing a United Nations trusteeship agreement for the colony. But the word trusteeship was kept out of the agreement and out of the UN resolution 1752 (XVII), so that made it easy for corrupt UN officials to omit the colony from the agenda of the Trusteeship Council.

Something like a half million people have been killed in the colony to keep the US gold mine open, it a slow motion genocide for benefit of US shareholders. And its an example of corruption at the United Nations.

Author Profile

David Rohde is an investigative reporter for Reuters. He served as a Reuters foreign affairs columnist from September 2011 to January 2014. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former reporter for The New York Times. His most recent book is "Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East."